Sunrez UV Resin Systems Transform Blade Repair

Bret Tollgaard, president of Sunrez, explores how UV-cured resins
are transforming wind turbine blade repair by dramatically reducing
cure times from hours to minutes. Sunrez's technology enables
repairs in extreme temperatures and high humidity, extending
maintenance seasons and increasing turbine uptime. Drawing from
decades of experience across aerospace and marine applications,
Tollgaard demonstrates how pre-impregnated UV materials are helping
operators and repair teams save thousands of dollars per repair
while getting turbines back online faster. Fill out our Uptime
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Saxum: Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy's
brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow. Allen
Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight. I'm your
host, Allen Hall, along with my co host, Joel Saxum. Today, we're
joined by Bret Tollgaard, president and CEO of Sunrez Corporation,
a pioneering force in UV curing technology. Under Bret's
leadership, Sunrez has emerged as an industry leader. Welcome in
developing advanced UV cured resins and composites particularly for
wind turbine blade repair. Based in El Cajon, California, Sunrez
brings nearly four decades of expertise in UV curing technology.
Today, we will explore how their cutting edge solutions are
addressing some of the most pressing challenges in wind turbine
maintenance. Bret, welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast
Spotlight. Thanks for having me, Allen. Appreciate it. We know
there's a lot of challenges in the repair business at the moment on
using standard materials resin systems out on blades. Particularly
as it gets colder in the springtime and the fall where seasons get
cut short and you still have blades to repair. Everybody always has
blades to repair. So you hear about this large rush to get blades
stabilized to get to the next spring. That's a big problem for the
industry right now. How much of that do you see of people just
saying, I don't know what to do, I can't get my blades fixed before
the season. It's where SunRez comes in with UV cured materials,
right? Bret Tollgaard: Yeah, absolutely. Really one of the biggest
values that we add for our customers is time. And we save time in a
tremendous amount of ways. One, the time for the repair window is
greatly increased because we don't really require any heat to cure
and kick off our UV curing resin. You can cure at much colder
temperatures and much hotter temperatures without any impact from
the ambient air. Temperature or humidity. So you can hear materials
a lot deeper into the season, so you're no longer constrained by
how cold it is outside. It's really then, at that point, what kind
of worker wants to get out, up on top of that wind tower. Joel
Saxum: I think a big thing there too, Brad, is, we're talking about
UV cured resins being able to extend seasons, but what it can do
within a season, right? So when you're talking like a major repair
that you got grinding layer, grinding layer, and all of a sudden
you're three weeks into this thing. A three week repair, if you're
able to, boom, cure fast, boom, cure fast, move to the next step,
that might shorten that thing down to a week? So is that possible?
Is that much time savings? Bret Tollgaard: Absolutely. So one of
the big things that UVCure resins do is they use the light photons
from either the sunshine or one of our handheld LED lamps to cure
our, kick off our resin. And so what we can do is we can cure up to
a quarter inch thick laminate in under five minutes. And depending
on the light intensity that you have and the surface area that
you're trying to cure you can really fast track your repairs. And
so we provide pre impregnated sheets of fiber to the wind market.
So you don't have to worry about mixing any resin up tower, getting
the right amount on there, vacuum bagging, heat blanket, et cetera.
We provide pre impregnated sheets that have the optimum amount of
resin for mechanical properties and adhesion to the wind turbine
blade. And so what that allows customers to do is to actually peel,
stick, and cure a laminate piece. To go ahead and repair that
surface really quickly. Allen Hall: And I think there's really two
marketplaces I've seen your materials used out in the field. One is
just major structural repairs that it just gets so cumbersome to
do. The UV cured makes sense. The other one is I have a blade that
I has some substantial crack in it. And this is interesting cause I
ran across this in Oklahoma of all places. Blade with a huge crack
in it. And they had temporarily patched it to hold it together
using your material just for sense of speed. Let's just stabilize
it and move on and fix other blades and the farm will come back to
this, which is really hard to do with existing resin systems. Bret
Tollgaard: Our prepregs in general are used in kind of three
primary areas. Corrosion resistance, not quite as applicable to the
wind market, but cosmetic and structural repairs. And so they lend
themselves really well to doing large, thick laminates. But also
for smaller cosmetic things or even zippering certain cracks. So
something that you might have seen where they have staged pre pregs
to do some crack propagation mitigation. They're using a variety of
instances and really the technicians can get up and down tower just
so quickly. And so that's where one of the big advantages of UV
cure materials comes into place is how quickly they can get repairs
done Joel Saxum: from a commercial standpoint, Bret. There's a lot
of advantages here. So if I'm an ISP a blade repair company, I want
to come to my clients and say, Hey, we've got a way to do this
faster. This bid, maybe a chance for an ISP to get in front in the
bidding process or through an RFP. And now if I'm an operator, I'm
thinking the same thing. Hey, this is going to be, it could have
been a three week repair. Now a one week repair, or especially
places like I'm in Canada and our blade repair season is only 12
weeks long. And I'd like to extend it to 20 weeks or 24 weeks or
something. There's so many advantages to this. Where are you seeing
the most draw? Is it the operators themselves? Is it ISPs? Is it
the OEMs? Where's this coming from? Bret Tollgaard: So it's a
little bit of everything. So historically on the wind market, we
actually partnered up with GE and LM five, six years ago, and they
were the ones who really brought this material into the wind
market. They saw the value in it. And at that point in time, we
actually had a styrenated resin system. So had VOCs, it was a
flammable material. It was a vinyl ester based system, but they
still saw the merit and being able to complete jobs extremely
quick. And it wasn't that different from some of the, epoxy issues
that there were then that there were in the past since then we've
sold a little over 50, 000 patches. Sold tens of thousands of
square meters of material into the wind market alone. And now we've
brought out a new material actually in 2024, it's our 7355 vinyl
ester resin system. And so it's non styrenated, no VOC, no haps,
all single component. And now we've introduced that into the entire
wind market. And one of the things that will really help ISPs gain
the confidence in the material is having some of the other OEMs
come through, validate it, certify the material, and really check
it off saying this works well with our epoxy or polyester blades.
And so that's been our big focus for 2024 is gaining a little bit
more exposure. Introducing people to the material. But then we also
have a track record of both, cosmetic and structural repairs in
this market. Allen Hall: And I think that's key. And your
experience outside of WIND is also valuable. I know you've been
helping a number of different applications, ship based at times,
aerospace is another market you're in. Those are really helpful in
the WIND market also, because it gives you more just world
experience, world knowledge that you're bringing to the table when
you come back to help the WIND industry. Bret Tollgaard: Yeah,
absolutely. So Sunrez was actually founded in 1986. It's focused
almost exclusively on UVCure resins, putties, and prepregs. And so
on the decades of R& D that we've done applications installs,
new builds, et cetera we've gained a tremendous amount of knowledge
and experience on how to really best service a customer's specific
repair requirements. For the wind market, it's not that different
from, let's say marine, for instance, where you're, going to be
repairing composite components. So we know how to make them stick.
We know how to get the right structural properties. And being able
to deliver that to, in a form factor that technicians up tower can
actually use is a big challenge, but something that we've really
worked on. And think we've come up with a pretty good package.
Allen Hall: How does the UV resin systems work? What is the magic
in there? Because you, I've seen them over time, especially in
aerospace, and now I'm seeing your material in a lot of places.
What's the chemistry? What, what's actually happening when it says
a UV resin? Bret Tollgaard: Oh, that's a great question, Allen. So
traditional resins,